The Splat Pack

(2 of 4)

Bought and savvily marketed by Lionsgate, Saw was a huge hit, proving that mainstream audiences have an appetite for sadism--at least if it's cleverly conceived. Another Saw quickly followed. So far the franchise has earned more than $250 million worldwide, and Saw III will open in roughly 3,000 U.S. theaters Oct. 27, the biggest release of the films to date. Saw films skew to the under-25 audience and are as popular with girls as with guys. "Good horror movies don't need stars, and they don't need special effects," says Tom Ortenberg, Lionsgate president of theatrical films. "They earn their scares through twists, through intelligent writing and great up-and-coming directors." Most of the Splat Packers are on only their second or third film in a genre that many critics willfully ignore. If there's a nascent Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg in the mix, it's still too soon to tell. But there's certainly innovative filmmaking under way that rises above the mindless slasher sequels of the '80s or such predictable teen-star killfests of the '90s as I Know What You Did Last Summer.

The basic plotline of most of these films is that people are stuck somewhere and have to endure horrible things--or indeed, do horrible things to each other--to escape. The more deviant and repulsive the treatment, the better. Bousman, who directed the later Saw films, says he got inspiration for that meat-locker scene from shoveling the driveway during endless Kansas winters. "I always thought I was gonna die 'cause it was so cold outside," says Bousman. "What happened if you were stuck outside with no clothes on? The ideas start off in the real world, and then we take them beyond."

Roth's film Hostel, about young backpackers caught in a pay-for-torture club in Slovakia, was inspired, he says, by a website he saw advertising a club in Thailand that claimed to let you shoot someone for $10,000. The torture scenes Roth devised came from researching European witch trials and Nazis and from some trips he made to the tool aisle at Home Depot (one shot guarantees you'll never look at bolt cutters the same way again). In the scene that won Roth the Most Memorable Mutilation prize at this month's Scream Awards, a kind of horror Golden Globes, a rich American pays to blowtorch a Japanese girl's eyeball. "I don't know if it's medically accurate that the white goo would come out of her eye," says Roth. "It just looked so disgusting we had to go with it." He later found out that torture by blowtorch has been used by Iraqis both during and after Saddam Hussein's rule. Roth, 34, has taken heat for the brutality in Hostel, the DVD of which knocked the family-friendly film The Chronicles of Narnia off the top-selling spot at Wal-Mart last spring. "People say, 'How can you put this stuff out there in the world?' Well, it's already out there," says Roth. He appeared on Fox News and proclaimed that it was because of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that Americans are watching horror films: "You're so scared, you want to scream."